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Posts tagged ‘pathetic’

Michelle Malkin’s “Twitchy” page is an insult to the political intelligence of this country. Malkin is a bottom feeding, sycophantic, intellectually dishonest “reporter” who created a website which features only the most insane tweets from anonymous idiots on Twitter who dare to say mean things about conservatives. She then offers this up as proof that “the left” is hateful.

Yeah. She uses Twitter posts from anonymous people and tries to pass that off as a legitimate talking point against people like me. Like I’m the same as some nameless 15 year old who said something mean about Sarah Palin.

Go over the Fox Nation or The Blaze and check out those comment sections if you’d like to see some hate. It’s despicable. But, I know they’re just random internet commenters. They say awful things under a mask of anonymity. It would be stupid of me to create a website and catalogue those comments because no one of any intelligence would consider it a true representation of “the right.” They’re the extreme, unhinged right. Just like the random idiots on Twitter do not represent the left. Any thinking person knows this.

Except Malkin. She’s not stupid, though; she’s dishonest. Her site completely ignores ANY of the racist, vile, disgusting things that conservatives say. Why? Because she’s not interested in being honest or fair. She’s interested in lying in order cater to her base of unhinged conservatives who want “proof” that “liberals” and “the left” are terrible people. She lies to create profit. She is the worst kind of offender in today’s political media: dishonest and manipulative while being bombastically and egotistically proud of it.

“The idea of an individual mandate to control health care costs, however, is not new. It goes back to 1989 and a man named Mark Pauly. An expert on health care policy, Pauly was part of a group of academics brought to the White House by President George H.W. Bush.

The group’s task was to fix health care; its solution was to let the marketplace solve it and create an individual mandate. Pauly tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that, at the time, many Republicans, including the president, loved the idea.”

The article goes on to say how when it was first introduced, Democrats in Congress declared the idea DOA. So what has changed now? Only the person who put the idea forward. In this case, in an effort to prove that he was open to all kinds of solutions to the problem of health care, Obama reached out and incorporated this originally Republican idea. For Republicans, agreeing with Obama about anything is anathema to their base, so immediately they had to be against it in the same way that Democrats opposed the idea in the 90′s—it didn’t come from their team, so it had to be bad.

This is one of many problems in American politics. Politicians are more interested in playing team games than helping the American people. Governing should be very simple: either it’s a good idea or it’s not, and you vote that way. But that’s not how it works (I’m not sure it ever has), and the current behavior and hyper-partisanship of our politicians, all of them, is contributing to the divide in this country’s citizenry.

When the citizens are so divided, the majority in each area have been electing more and more heavily partisan politicians. This is true much more of Republicans than of Democrats. There are no versions of “Tea Party” candidates on the left. The Tea Party has guaranteed that in districts and states with Republican majorities, the people there are voting for more and more conservative candidates. They no longer vote for moderates, and it’s represented very well by the low opinion of and enthusiasm for a moderate like Romney (who’s trying his best to say he’s not a moderate). And when those highly conservative Republicans get into power, “compromise” becomes a dirty word. Nothing gets done. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Mike Pence all went on the record in 2010 to declare that there would be “no compromise” with the President, and they’ve stuck to their word.

The result? Gridlock and partisan demagoguery that sees senators voluntarily leaving their jobs because the environment has become so hostile (see: Olympia Snowe and Evan Bayh). The loser? As always, the American poor.